


love looks not with the eyes

by illyas



Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, Phantom of the Opera - Lloyd Webber
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, First Kiss, Fluff and Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:20:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23695321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illyas/pseuds/illyas
Summary: Erik does not make it a habit to notice chorus girls, but this one is different.He is meant to be alone this morning. The entire opera house knows better than to disturb their strange pianist in his endless hours of practice, but no one seems to have passed that piece of wisdom on to her, because there she is, slipping through the doors without so much as a glance at where he’s sat behind the piano in the shadows, his latest composition in hand.
Relationships: Christine Daaé & Erik | Phantom of the Opera, Christine Daaé/Erik | Phantom of the Opera
Comments: 22
Kudos: 208





	love looks not with the eyes

**Author's Note:**

> "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind  
> And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind."  
> –William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Erik does not make it a habit to notice chorus girls, but this one is different.

He is meant to be alone this morning. The entire opera house knows better than to disturb their strange pianist in his endless hours of practice, but no one seems to have passed that piece of wisdom on to her, because there she is, slipping through the doors without so much as a glance at where he’s sat behind the piano in the shadows, his latest composition in hand. 

She’s beautiful. It is the first thing that Erik thinks, and though beauty is something so far removed from his world, he cannot help but be mesmerized. Her curls are piled fetchingly on her head like her very own golden crown, her cheeks red from the brisk autumn air outside. He sees her wide blue eyes glance briefly across the room, barely taking it in before dropping her bag by the door and stepping further into the rehearsal space. He spares a moment to wonder what she is doing here so early when no one is due to interrupt him until half past eight, but any question is soon chased from his mind when she begins to sing. 

Her voice—he can hardly describe it. It isn’t perfect, and her technique could use adjustments, but her notes ring clearly in the empty air, pushed out of her chest with a burning passion that touches even his poor twisted soul. A voice like that is a diamond to be polished, not to be hidden and drowned out among mediocre chorus girls, and Erik finds himself foolishly wondering what it would be like to take that voice and mould it into the potential he _knows_ lies beneath her veneer of untrained youth. 

She still has not spied him, sunken into the shadows behind his precious piano with his monstrous mouth agape with surprise beneath his mask, too consumed is she in her music. Erik does not recognize the song, and that makes her all the more of a mystery. It is neither in French nor in Italian, and though it bears some resemblance to German it is not close enough to be understood, and he is helplessly caught between the puzzle of the words and the magnificence of her performance. 

Her final note hangs in the air with elegance despite the breathless heaving of her chest. Her eyes are closed—Erik only allows himself one guilty second to mourn the loss—and a honey-sweet smile just barely dances on her lips. 

He isn’t thinking when he speaks. 

“You have a remarkable voice, Mademoiselle.”

The girl—he really must ask her name—startles, those long lashes flying open over electric blue. Her hand jumps to her heart. 

“Good Lord!” Her voice is as sweet when she speaks as when she sings. Her cheeks flush pink. “I did not realize I had an audience.” 

“Forgive me if I frightened you,” says Erik. “I was just sitting down to practice when you came in, and I did not think it right to interrupt.” 

“It’s quite alright,” she answers with a smile. Then, almost shyly, she adds, “My name is Christine Daaé.”

“Erik,” he answers, rising from the bench. 

He realizes his mistake within the second. He had meant to shake her hand, forgetting himself so fully that the masked deformity of his face had for a moment eclipsed his memory, but the sudden shock on her face and the half-step she takes backwards, away from him, are familiar enough. The room is poorly illuminated, but not so much so that the light fails to touch him, exposed from behind the shield of his dear instrument, and even masked, something about him inspired fear. 

“It has been a pleasure, Miss Daaé,” he says smoothly, resigned. Even now, it is hard to push away the hurt. “I should inform you, in the event where you would prefer privacy in your rehearsal, that this space is usually mine at this hour of the morning.”

“Oh,” she said weakly. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you.” 

“I assure you, I did not mind,” Erik answers curtly, and sits back down at the piano.

He rests his thin—skeletal, his mind provides—hands on the ivory keys and wills himself to concentrate on the sheet music before him, his ear listening to the shuffle of Christine’s feet moving towards the door. 

Her footsteps stop just as the door creaks open. 

“May I—” She hesitates. “May I stay and listen?” 

Under his mask, Erik’s eyebrows shoot up his forehead.

“Pardon me?” 

“May I stay and listen?” she asks again. She smiles, a tentative little expression just for him. “Since you heard me sing.”

“I—If you would like to, certainly.”

He keeps his eyes on her as she drops her bag again, her smile widening. The door falls closed behind her with a muted thud. 

“Thank you, Erik.”

Words were never his strong suit, and where they fail him is when music takes over. His fingers fly over the ivory almost without his permission—his creations are graven into his very muscles, he hardly needs his mind to agree with it. 

He doesn’t know what he expects, but it is not for her to cross the rehearsal room with light steps and sit down next to Erik on the piano bench. She’s perched on the very edge, as if careful not to touch him, but even so he feels his heart move into his throat. The mask seems to burn where it touches his skin. He wishes he had thought to make a mask that covered his twisted mouth, not just the horror of his skeletal cheeks and sunken eyes—he wishes he had no need for it at all. He regrets, now, permitting her to stay. He never could afford the price of flying to close too close to beauty. 

Christine’s eyes are fixed firmly on the melody penned down on the pages before him. This piece has no vocals to it, but some selfish creature in the pit of his stomach wishes it did—perhaps she would sing it for him, if he asked... He banishes the idea. That thought is nothing but hope, and hope had never served him well before. 

“You’re really amazing,” Christine murmurs over the notes. 

When he dares glance over to her, she’s looking at him, her body closer than he remembers. He can almost feel the warmth radiating off of her. 

He pulls his hands off the keys with a horribly startled sound. Heat rises to his cheeks—the mask is, at least, good for covering that—and he clears his throat uselessly, if only to buy time to collect himself. 

“Thank you,” is the answer he settles on, cursing himself all the while for this particular lack of eloquence. 

Christine gives him a bright smile in return. It’s rather like watching the sun come out from behind cloud cover, Erik thinks to himself. 

“It was a pleasure, Erik,” she says, rising from the bench with the grace of a saw. Erik does not allow himself to dwell on how much he would prefer her to stay. In just a few steps she has crossed the floor, oblivious to his turmoil, that damned smile still painted onto the curve of her lips as reaches for her bag. “I should go, I don’t want to bother you any longer. Perhaps I shall see you around?” 

She lingers with her hand on the doorknob and an expectant expression on her face. 

“Perhaps,” he answers, and it seems to be enough. 

She turns to leave, but Erik’s mind had been working on an idea somewhere between hearing her sing and watching her go, and his treacherous tongue chooses this moment to spit it out. 

“You should allow me to coach you,” he says.

Christine’s attention comes back to him—his heart rasps its approval, already starved for her recognition—and he races to bring his thoughts up to speed with his mouth. 

“Sorry, coach?”

“As I said, Miss Daaé: You have a remarkable voice. With just a bit more training, you could be a soloist.” 

He does not reveal the true motives at hand, the selfish beast that sits at the centre of all of his words. All he wants is to hear her sing once more; to pretend her song was for him, and him alone. He knows nothing of beauty, but music! Music, he understands, and her music was crystalline in its purity. 

“You are too kind,” she says with a wild blush, “but I’m afraid I could hardly afford it.”

“My work is my reward,” he says softly. “Please, I insist.” 

As though through the lens of a dream, he sees himself pull an empty piece of manuscript paper from his binder and write out his personal number, stand from the piano, and dare to walk out under the stark lights bathing the centre of the rehearsal room. Christine meets him halfway with elegant steps and words of gratitude on her lips. Her fingers are warm when they close around the paper, she only looks once at the skeletal hands that hand it to her before leaving with a warm “I’ll call you!” that seems to fill the empty room when she is gone. 

What has he gotten himself into? 

There is a part of him that does not dare to wait on her message; there is an even greater part that startles at his phone’s every sound, wondering if all his waiting has finally paid off. It feels pathetic, how easily he has let obsession consume him. A pretty face who hadn’t shunned him on sight, and he was already halfway to infatuation. 

He is so consumed by the thoughts jumping back and forth in his mind that he doesn't even manage to dredge up some semblance of surprise when his phone chimes a notice for a message simply reading “This is Christine. When would you be free?”

He sends back a “Whenever is most convenient, Miss Daaé.” 

If a smile finds its place on his ruined lips, well, it’s nobody’s business but his. 

They meet thrice a week, and Erik spends the other four days counting down the hours until he sees her again. He’s thoroughly enchanted by her presence. And life goes on even when one is helplessly burning up in a star’s orbit, but it is difficult to remember his place when Christine is just so _kind_ to him. Her smiles are too liberally given, her voice too dazzling to wall out of his heart, and so he suffers in silence through the pangs of longing that crackle through his chest and conjures wild fantasies about the twinkle in her eye.

He fancies, sometimes, that she might feel something for him like he for her. It is, as far as ideas go, a wild one, but he finds he cannot let it go. There is something in the air during their lessons that is always so electric, and no matter how many times he tells himself it is only the music he remains, deep in his heart, unconvinced. In the dead of night, when nothing but the wisps of his dreams keep him company, he likes to think that it is _his_ tutelage alone that could have unlocked the blossoming talent that springs from her like water bursting forth from its alpine source. That he's unique, somehow, that his place in her life could be occupied by no other. That he _has_ a place in her life, beyond that of a teacher. 

Fantasy is truly the sweetest brand of agony. 

She touches him only once. It is three months into their acquaintanceship. Her hand brushes against his on the piano in a manner that feels too close to deliberate, and he jerks away from her so fast that the catch of her breath can be nothing but fear. 

“I’m sorry, Erik,” she says, painfully gentle. “Are you—I’m sorry.” 

For the first time in a long time, the mask makes him feel claustrophobic. He wonders irrationally if she has sensed his desire from that touch, or his loneliness. How much he craves; how base those cravings are. 

“No need for apologies,” he answers, and yet he doesn’t shift back to the centre of the bench until she has taken a step back.

"I didn't mean to," says Christine.

And that's just it, isn't it? She didn't mean to, but oh! how he wishes it were more than just an accident. He'll replay this moment later in the night when he's alone and wallowing in his lackluster destiny and torture himself with the hope that perhaps that casual touch had been intentional, only to wake up in the morning with a headache and a side of stinging self-loathing. 

"It's quite alright, Miss Daaé."

He cannot look at her directly for the remainder of their lesson. 

The question is long overdue, but it still catches Erik off guard.

“Why do you always wear the mask?” she asks before he can begin playing the accompaniment to her warmup. 

He tries for a smile—Christine likes those, he knows, they put her at ease—but he is too aware of how the expression stretches across his ruin of a face, and lets his thin lips press back into their usual severe line. His hands are still spread over ivory of his piano, right thumb resting on the familiar middle C, bony fingers poised to play. He wishes he hadn’t given her the opportunity to speak with his hesitation. 

“Miss Daaé, I’m afraid no one should be subjected to this face,” he says as casually as he can. He knows he succeeds when her expression becomes tinged with bitterness. “It has an uncanny similarity to something recently dragged out of a river. It is only polite to hide it.” 

Christine is frowning, and it is too close to the disappointment of a goddess for comfort. Erik feels rather like a pilgrim on his knees in supplication, though his logic knows that the comparison is nonsensical. He isn’t asking her for anything, isn’t praying to her for a favour, but he can’t help the occasional impulse to grovel before her when the light hits her hair just so, curled around her radiant face like her very own halo. 

“That’s not fair!” she says. It warms his poor heart that she sounds so indignant. “You should not have place the comfort of others above your own.”

“It is—I admit, it is not just for others,” he says quietly. 

He is afraid to look at her for a moment, staring down at his hands. There is a chip on the key under his left index finger that he has never noticed before. 

“You don’t have to hide around me, Erik. You know your face would never change what I think of you, right?” 

He doesn’t want to lie to her, so he holds his tongue and drowns any follow-up out with the steady sound of the piano. 

He calls her Miss Daaé until she explodes in anger one evening—and somewhere in the conversation he wonders when she began to come to his flat for their lessons, wonders when their three-times-a-week arrangement became four, became five, became whenever she could swing by, wonders when she started to stay afterwards for tea. 

“Aren’t we friends, Erik?” she asks. Fury is a brush of crimson on her cheek. “Why must you insist on being so—so impersonal?” 

“It’s only proper,” he says.

“Proper?” Her hair tumbles down her shoulder when she swings her gaze to him, pinning him in place like the exotic butterflies he has mounted on the walls. With a stare like that she could command a stage even in perfect silence. “I have known you half a year. It’s not proper, it’s cold.” 

Cold! He wants to laugh. What he feels for her is anything but cold, though it is a fact she may never know. The friendship of a monster is difficult enough to bear—what ever should she do with his affections? 

“It was never my intention,” says Erik once he knows his voice will be steady. “You are my student. I simply do not make it a habit to presume familiarity.”

“Student? You’re a fool, Erik,” she spits. “You can never presume too much with me.” 

He doesn’t know what to say—he never seems to, when it’s important—but it’s of no consequence this time because his front door slams behind her with a sound fit to break his heart. 

He falls into the old velvet armchair across the little brick fireplace, the one Christine always preferred to sit in when she stayed after their lessons, and lifts his mask from his face. It clatters when he lets it fall on the side table, a horribly hollow sound in the silence of his empty apartment. Perhaps it was better so, Erik thinks to himself. For Christine to leave before he could taint her with the enormity of his want. He conjures up her portrait in his mind, rosy-cheeked and smiling, and tries in vain to imagine a world he could stand next to her beauty. It would need a miracle. 

His hand comes up to rub at his eyes, and regrets it instantly. The warped skin of his cheeks and the gaping hole of his nose are almost bearable when he need not acknowledge them, but now, alone with his heart sunken into his feet, they feel more pronounced than ever. 

He doesn’t hear the click of a door opening until it is too late. 

“Erik, I’m sorry, I did not meant to be so—Oh!”

He had forgotten to lock up behind her—that was his first mistake. He’d taken off the mask—his second. And now Christine stands in the doorway with bright startled eyes, and he wishes he could disappear out of sheer force of will because this was every one of his nightmares rendered in excruciating reality. 

He screws his eyes shut and hopes it’s enough to protect him from her terror. 

“Oh Erik,” she says. Strangely, she sound more sad than afraid. 

There is only silence, save the rustle of her clothes as she moves, and then there are delicate hands tracing his jaw. They drag lines up his ruined cheeks, thumbs moving in soothing strokes over the short bridge of his missing nose, over the eyebrows that frame his deep set eyes. Erik shudders at the touch, the sensation sending a whisper of something unrecognizable down his spine. Her fingers are so gentle that he cannot help but lean into them, his heart aching, his lungs frozen between breaths. 

He’s dreaming, he must be.

“Will you look at me?” Christine asks. 

He keeps his eyes closed when he shakes his head. 

“Erik,” she says. “Please?” 

He could never deny her. 

He desperately wants to escape her eye, but no such luck is afforded to him. Her touch angles his face upwards, tilted towards the heavens, surely exposing every cursed crevasse of his skin to her gaze. He debates if he dares touch her, if only to pull her hands away. 

“Have you seen your fill, Miss Daaé?” 

She moves silently to kneel between his legs, and all of a sudden he’s looking down into eyes that he would gladly drown in, if she would permit it. Her hands, by some divine gift, still rest on his cheeks, forcing him to bow his head to look at her. 

“My name is Christine,” she says. The words a barely a whisper on her lips. “And I intend to do far more that look.”

It’s a frankly baffling statement until he realizes how close she is, how she moves to cup the back of his head, a firm pressure pulling him down towards the cupid’s bow that had featured so prominently in his dreams these past few months. 

She’s kissing him. 

He gasps into her mouth, overwhelmed with emotion, overwhelmed with sensation. His hands end up in her hair, on her shoulder, uncertain whether he should be pulling her close or pushing her away. Their every point of contact burns in the most delicious way. It is more vivid than any dream. 

She pulls back the barest of centimetres, just enough for him to stare into her eyes. 

“Christine, you can’t—”

“Can’t what?” she mumbles. Her breath ghosts over his lips. “Can’t want you? Love you? Because I do, Erik. I told you, you can never presume too much with me.” 

“You can’t love this face.” 

It is that statement that makes her move away almost entirely, though even so she drags her hands down Erik’s body to come rest on his trembling thighs. 

“Don’t insult me, Erik, and don’t tell me what I can or cannot feel,” she says with fire in her voice. 

“Don’t pretend that you think this is... _beautiful_ ,” he says with a vague gesture towards the wreck that is his skin. 

He nearly chokes on that last word. Beautiful. What a miserable adjective. 

“I will not lie to you and say it isn’t shocking,” says Christine. She makes to stand up, only to swing her legs over his, landing firmly in his lap. “But don’t you understand? It’s beautiful because it’s you.” 

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize for any spelling/grammar mistakes—I truly am the most horrible editor. Hope you enjoyed :)


End file.
